Academic staff in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Head of School

David is a physical geographer with interdisciplinary research interests focusing on 3 complementary themes within hydroclimatology (interface between hydrology-climatology): (1) hydroclimatological processes within alpine, Arctic, mountain and glacierized river basins; (2) climate and river flow regimes; and (3) river energy budget and thermal dynamics. He has ...

Academic staff

Dr Mohamed Abdallah has a wide experience in applying various mass spectrometric techniques for analysis of trace levels of environmental contaminants in biotic and abiotic matrices including different human tissues. He has also made contributions to the field of human exposure to persistent organic pollutants using various exposure and pharmacokinetic models.

Dr Alam’s research focuses on understanding the chemistry of key atmospheric pollutants. His research involves interpreting laboratory and field measurements using numerical modelling, and improving the accuracy of chemistry within atmospheric models.

Paul has Research expertise in the petrogenesis and emplacement of granite from structural, geophysical, petrological and geochemical data.

He also has extensive pedagogic experience, having developed a science-based area of learning at a college for adults with learnings disabilities and lectured on a wide variety of university-level topics.

Lauren Andres is an urban planner with substantive academic expertise in the field of urban and economic geography. Her fields of interest include the policies and governance process of urban and economic regeneration and broadly the understanding of the role of (temporary) creative uses and intermediaries in shaping spaces and making places. In addition she is also interesting in ...

Dr Arribas-Bel is interested in the intersection between quantitative spatial methods, urban analysis from the Social Sciences and new sources of data. His research focuses on how the computational advances of our age, combined with powerful statistical methodologies, can further our understanding of cities in general and their spatial structure in particular. That is, how new ...

Austin is an experienced teacher, researcher and writer who brings a passion for cities and urban life to all aspects of his professional work. He has played a leading role in development of planning education at the University of Birmingham and has established a research profile in the planning and regeneration of city centres and inner cities in Britain, Europe and North America.

Nick is a glaciologist, specialising in mass balance and dynamics of the Earth's glaciers and ice sheets. His research aims to understand how and why Earth's land ice cover is changing and the impact of these changes on global sea levels. This research involves application and analysis of airborne and satellite remote sensing tools, in situ measurements and numerical models.

Lesley Batty is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science (teaching focussed) and brings her enthusiasm and expertise in this area to all aspects of her work. She is also Senior Tutor for GEES, responsible for ensuring that all our students have a great experience during their studies in the School.

David is staff member of the National Center of Atmospheric Sciences (NCAS) working at Birmingham University. His interests are in the research and development of scientific instrumentation, novel multivariate data analysis algorithms and atmospheric modelling tools used for the interpretation of data collected from atmospheric aerosols.

Daniel Befort is a meteorologist specialized in climate variability of extreme events. His current research focuses on the representation of extra-tropical cyclones and wind storms affecting the European region in state-of-the-art seasonal forecasting systems to identify mechanisms steering the inter-annual variability of these extreme events .

Dr Simon Bell’s research revolves around the Wintersense project, an ‘Internet of Things’ of approach to sensing road surface temperatures. He aims to have a dense network of low-cost, Wi-Fi enabled, contactless sensors deployed across Birmingham by the end of 2015.

Simon has a strong background in the use of low-cost sensing for measuring weather ...

James is a paleoclimatologist, specialising in molecular organic geochemistry (e.g. molecular climatology). His research is focused on Cenozoic and Holocene climate evolution, high-resolution palaeoclimatology and biomarker proxy development.

Atmospheric processing controls the current and future composition of our atmosphere, and affects human and environmental health, air quality and climate. My research group addresses three areas of atmospheric chemistry central to these impacts :

Measurement and interpretation of ozone production in the atmospheric boundary layer

Ian is a micropalaeontologist who studies calcareous benthic microfossils, particularly ostracods (microscopic Crustacea), but also foraminifera, to reconstruct past environments. His work spans much of the last 200 million years of earth history, with projects as diverse as the late-glacial history of lakes in Scotland and the vast inland seas of the Ponto-Caspian region, to sea-level ...

Senior Research Fellow and Academic Keeper, Lapworth Museum of Geology

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Richard is a vertebrate palaeontologist whose research focuses on the systematics, evolution and biogeography of late Palaeozoic to Mesozoic reptiles. He is particularly interested in the origin and dramatic evolutionary radiation of dinosaurs and closely related fossil groups in the aftermath of the Permo-Triassic mass extinction, the largest extinction event in the history of life on Earth. ...

Dr Xiaoming Cai has over 20 years experience of research in large-eddy simulation (LES) of turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer and in urban street canyons, dispersion of air pollutants in urban environment, and numerical modelling of meso-scale systems.

Dr Lee Chapman’s research interests are at the interface of climatology and engineering investigating the impact of weather and climate on the built environment; an important research area given the ever-increasing concentration (and vulnerability) of the population and critical infrastructure in urban areas. This covers a range of topics and sub-disciplines including ...

Julian Clark researches the political geographies of Europe, the governance of natural resources, and the interrelations between political geography and political science. He has written widely on political geography and environmental governance, and has research monographs published with Oxford University Press and Routledge.

Leigh Crilley is a chemist specializing in the field of air pollution/atmospheric chemistry. His current research involves investigating the rate of ozone production in the boundary layer using in situ field measurements

Mark Cuthbert's research, into process fundamentals in subsurface hydrology and paleohydro(geo)logy, is currently focussed on groundwater sustainability in drylands, improving interpretations of speleothem climate proxy archives and exploring how groundwater has influenced our evolution as a species.

Rosie Day is an environmental human geographer interested in various aspects of peoples experience of, and engagement with, the wider environment. Much of her work has been in the area of environmental inequalities and environmental justice where she has developed a particular theme on ageing and environmental issues. She is currently largely focused on research to do ...

Dr Delgado-Saborit is an expert in exposure assessment studies using different sampling and analytical techniques to characterize inhalation doses, personal exposures and environmental levels of air pollutants. She has expertise in chemical speciation for source identification. She has coordinated large projects involving recruiting and sampling with subjects, sampling in a wide range of indoor ...

Simon is a fluvial geomorphology researcher who has worked on quantifying the impacts of river restoration on changing flood risk, as well as the organization and transport of wood in small rivers during floods. He is currently working on the NERC “MegaScours” project looking at river confluences in the world’s largest rivers.

Tom is a micropalaeontologist and paleoceanograher specializing in the study of fossil coccolithophore algae. His research interests are focused on the warm-climate states of the Paleogene period and include the evolution, systematics and ecology of coccolithophores. Tom has also worked on the paleoceanography and paleoclimates of large climate perturbations, including the ...

Warren Eastwood is a biogeographer and palaeoecologist who researches past environmental change for the last 25,000 years or so in the eastern Mediterranean region. His main specialism is elucidating natural versus human-induced vegetation change using pollen analysis (palynology). His research interests also include the impact of major volcanic eruptions and tephrochronology of volcanic ...

Steven is an interdisciplinary environmental researcher with a broad interest in human-environment relations. His work is informed by rural geography, social anthropology and rural sociology and focuses on the relationship between sociocultural values and environmental practices, interventions, policies and governance. He has applied this approach most especially to the study of ...

Ian Fairchild is a geoscientist with broad interests in the geochemistry of the Earth’s surface, climate change and Quaternary and Neoproterozoic earth history. He employs this breadth of knowledge in teaching, in public outreach, and professional activities such as examining and research assessment. He is equally at home in the field and the laboratory with a wealth of ...

Emma is a Research Fellow with interests in applied climatology, air quality, GIS and public engagement. She has a broad background in geography, earth and environmental sciences, and research experience in academia and consultancy.

Emma is currently working with Network Rail on Summersense, the NERC-funded project: Dynamic heat risk management to reduce the costs of ...

Grace’s research investigates the effects of weather, climate, and landuse (particularly riparian vegetation and stormwater control measures) on in-channel hydrological processes. She is especially interested in monitoring and deterministic modelling of river water energy budgets and the thermal dynamics of water under present and probable future climates; this is the focus of her ...

Sophie Hadfield-Hill is a Human Geographer whose research is informed by children's, urban and development geographies. Sophie has been awarded an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant to explore urban living, sustainability and everyday life within the context of a new city development in India.

Mr Hale is currently working as part of the Liveable Cities project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). This project aims to explore the broader wellbeing impacts of low carbon interventions for cities. Specifically, he is exploring how different lighting technologies and building densities impact on ecosystem services. Prior to this he was part of ...

Stuart is an environmental chemist whose research addresses all aspects of the environmental sources, fate and behaviour of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). He has particular interests in human exposure to POPs with a focus on indoor pathways. He is also active in research that explores the environmental forensics utility of chirality.

Roy Harrison’s research interests lie in the field of environment and human health. His main specialism is in air pollution, from emissions through atmospheric chemical and physical transformations to exposure and effects on human health. Much of this work is designed to inform the development of policy.

Alan is a geologist and igneous petrologist working on large igneous provinces, subduction zone magmatism and generation of the Earth's first continental crust. His current research focuses on experimental petrology to determine if fusing oceanic plateau material can be linked to early crustal generation.

Dr Alan Herbert is a leading mathematical modeler and hydrogeologist specializing in the understanding of coupled processes and heterogeneous groundwater systems. Of particular interest are deep fractured rocks and the applications to nuclear waste disposal, geothermal energy and fracking for exploitation of shale gas resources.

Dr Hilton is a research focused palaeobotanist and evolutionary plant biologist with interests in palaeoenvironments and palaeoecology. His underlying goals are to increase the quantity of paleobotanical data included into evolutionary analyses and to provide a more detailed understanding of the past environments and climates in which fossil plants lived. He has a broad background ...

I am a social and urban geographer who specialises in identity, belonging, security and the governance of communities. My ESRC-funded doctoral research investigated the political-identity and governance of Muslim communities in Birmingham, in light of the Government’s emerging set of counter-terrorism and anti-extremism policies.

Dr Phil Jones is a cultural geographer who focuses on issues related to the city. His work deals with a number of research areas including urban regeneration, cycling and the arts. He has a particular interest in research methods, including qualitative GIS, mobile interviewing and arts-based approaches.

Dr Nick Kettridge specializes in characterizing the ecohydrological resilience of ecosystems to both natural and anthropogenic disturbance. Much of his research focuses on peatlands; understanding the processes that control the provision of key ecosystem services within these environments, and quantifying their response to changing climatic conditions and extreme events such as fire and drought.

Kieran Khamis is a hydroecologist with a specialist knowledge of alpine river systems. His current research is focused on the development of a real time, fluorescence-based monitoring system for surface waters.

Dr Kirchner-Bossi has specialised in the study of wind variability from diverse perspectives and scales, that provided innovative resources to describe mid and long term wind variability. He is currently engaged in the analysis of the mid- to long-term variability of winter windstorms in Europe.

Megan’s research focuses on the linkages between geomorphology, hydrology and ecology. Currently, she is working on a NERC- funded project to determine the efficiency of alternative (permanent and transient) instream wood restoration designs for the management of biogeochemical cycling and nutrient uptake in the hyporheic zone of lowland rivers. The outcomes of this project will directly ...

Marcus Köhler is an atmospheric scientist, primarily interested in the interactions between atmospheric chemistry and climate. His research focuses on the numerical simulation of chemistry and transport processes in the atmosphere, and in current work he investigates the impact of cirrus clouds on atmospheric chemistry in the tropical tropopause layer. In the past his research ...

Dr Stefan Krause is a Reader in Hydrology in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences. His interdisciplinary research group on coupled groundwater and surface water systems investigates the multifaceted impacts of global environmental change on hydrological fluxes, biogeochemical cycling and contaminant transport, and ecohydrological feedback functions in complex ...

Dr Gregor Leckebusch is one of the foremost experts in the field of linking natural science research on meteorological and climatological extreme events with the estimation of natural hazards damage potentials. He played a key role in several national and international interdisciplinary projects dedicated to the assessment of natural and anthropogenic changes in extreme events and impacts of ...

Mark is an ecologist researching environmental change in freshwaters. His research group is focused on understanding how environmental stressors and climate change, especially extreme climatic events such as floods, droughts and heat waves, affect the structure and functioning of aquatic ecosystems. His group works empirically across a range of spatial and temporal scales, from laboratory ...

Peter’s research and teaching focuses on the relationship between people and place based social exclusion, how policies are designed to reduce exclusion and increase competitiveness whilst reconciling the uneven trajectory and function of places.

He has led on a number of housing market, regeneration and planning related research and consultancy projects for a ...

James Levine is an atmospheric chemist, interested in changes in atmospheric composition driven by interactions between the atmosphere (both atmospheric chemistry and climate) and the biosphere. He is currently working on a project, the Cooperative LBA Atmospheric Regional Experiment, that aims to: improve our understanding of the influence that trace gases emitted from the Amazon ...

Dr Iseult Lynch joined the academic staff at the University of Birmingham as Lecturer in Environmental Nanosciences in March 2013. She has a very broad overview of all aspects of nanomerials safety assessment and the data requirements, having served as Chair of the EU Nanosafety Cluster Working Group (NSC WG) on databases for the last 2 years (and as co-Chair of the Hazed WG prior to that), ...

Zena Lynch worked as a Principal Environmental Health Officer for many years, prior to becoming the Health Policy Advisor for the West Midlands Regional Assembly and latterly as Programme Director for ‘Living Well West Midlands’. She currently teaches on the MSc in Environmental Health and MSc in Public and Environmental Health Science and the BSc Environmental Science courses.

Rob MacKenzie is an atmospheric scientist with a particular interest in how plants affect air composition. Watch a video of him describing one aspect of his research in 60 seconds by clicking on the play icon above.

As a result of a £15M grant, the University of Birmingham has set up the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR), of which Rob ...

Mauro's research focuses on the chemical and physical characterization of atmospheric pollutants. He is currently employed on the CHEERS project funded under a European Union Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships and aiming to investigate the impact of aircraft emissions upon particulate matter concentrations and size distributions.

Professor Alexander Milner has been at the University of Birmingham for 15 years, where he was initially responsible for setting up the Environmental Science and Environmental Management degrees. He is now responsible for the Masters degree in River Environmental Management. His research involves river ecosystems in alpine and Arctic environments and has long term studies in Glacier Bay ...

Dominique Moran’s research and teaching is in the sub-discipline of carceral geography, a geographical perspective on incarceration. She currently holds over £1m of ESRC funding, for research into prison visitation and recidivism, and prison design, has recently completed an interdisciplinary ESRC research project looking into women’s experience of imprisonment in contemporary ...

Martin Müller is interested in how the social and the material hold together and fall apart. His empirical work focuses on the planning and impacts of mega-events as well as on the disruptive effects of natural disturbance such as insect pests. He is a Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the University of Zurich and is associated with the School of Geography, Earth ...

Dr Vlad Mykhnenko is a scholar, committed to the advancement of geographical political economy, with its focus on modern capitalist social formations as spatially and temporally uneven and highly variegated systems. To this end, he combines the theoretical insights and methodologies of Economic Geography, Urban & Regional Economics, and Comparative Political Economy.

Dr Nikolova's research focuses on improving the predictive capability of the behavior of traffic-generated nanoparticles in an urban environment. Her research involves model development that will incorporate the condensed-mass advection model MADVEC with the street scale canyon model CiTTyCAT/CiTTy-Street and a Large-Eddy simulation (LES) model. The proposed modelling system, accounting ...

Pat Noxolo’s research is at the confluence of international development, culture and in/security, and uses postcolonial, discursive and literary approaches to explore the spatialities of a range of Caribbean and British cultural practices. Recent work has focused on theorizations of space in the novels of Wilson Harris, Maryse Condé and Earl Lovelace; on Caribbean laughter ...

Dr Matt O’Callaghan is an ecologist specializing in stream and floodplain invertebrate responses to disturbance. His current research is investigating the impact of drought on the functioning of stream ecosystems, part of a NERC funded project led by Dr Mark Ledger.

Jon Oldfield’s research explores Russian understandings of physical natural systems with a specific focus on the work and ideas of Russian physical geographers during the late tsarist and Soviet periods. He is currently examining the development of Soviet climate science via the work of the climatologist M.I. Budyko. His research is funded by the ESRC, AHRC and British Academy.

Ian Phillips is best known for writing the most comprehensive account of the 1973 Isle of Man Summerland fire disaster. He gained his BSc Geography degree from the University of Birmingham in 1995, before continuing at the University to complete an MSc in Meteorology and Climatology and a PhD in Geography. Ian has been on the teaching staff of the University since September ...

Francis is a chemist with wide ranging interests in the atmospheric sciences. He applies a fundamental physicochemical approach to investigate atmospheric species and develops novel instrumentation to probe their processes.

In particular he is interested in: the assessment of geoengineering schemes, primary biological aerosols and their role in atmosphere-biosphere ...

Jessica Pykett is a social and political geographer with research interests in citizenship and the practices of governing, the geographies of education, and the formation of neurological and psychological citizen-subjectivities.

Adam Ramadan’s work lies at the intersection between political and cultural geography. It addresses the ‘everyday’ of geopolitics, how ordinary people understand and negotiate their position within broader geopolitical dynamics. Much of this work has focused on the Middle East, and in particular on refugee issues.

Sally is a physical geographer with experience and interest in interdisciplinary research on water resources, water security and climate change. Her current research with Dr Anne Van Loon is aiming to add the human dimension into drought research, a Rubicon project funded by the Dutch Science Foundation NWO.

Tim Reston is a geologist and a geophysicist with interests in the use of geophysics to study geological problems, especially tectonics. He specialises in the seismic imaging and tectonics of rifted continental margins and of slow-spreading mid-ocean ridges, with particular emphasis on detachment tectonics and the effects of mantle serpentinization.

Dr Michael Rivett is a Senior Lecturer in Contaminant Hydrogeology in the Water Sciences research groupwith a specialist field-scale research interest in the transport and remediation of organic contaminants in groundwater and contaminated land systems. He has published extensively on chlorinated solvents, DNAPLs and urban contamination and has additional on-going research interests in hyporheic ...

Dr Isabella Romer Roche is working with Eva Valsami-Jones in the NanoMILE project. She has wide experience in the synthesis and characterisation of nanoparticles, especially silver, working with a multimethod approach. Her work also includes stability of nanoparticles in environmentally relevant conditions.

John Round is a socio-economic geographer whose main research interest is concerned with how people/households develop tactics to cope with marginality in all its forms. His PhD examined how senior citizens survive in the Russian far north east city of Magadan in the face of extreme economic marginalization and hostile climatic conditions. After this he researched the experiences of ...

Jon Sadler is a biogeographer and ecologist who focuses on species population and assemblage dynamics in urban and riparian environments. His research involves interdisciplinary science using a combination of detailed field studies and field experimentation. His work emphasizes the links between environmental variability and species responses, with particular emphasis on urbanisation and ...

Over the last 20 years Dr Sambrook Smith has been investigating the linkages between river processes and sedimentology at scales ranging from individual pores within a river bed up to km-long bars in some of the Worlds largest rivers. Research aims to generate new, generic and quantitative understanding of how rivers function across these scales. This is facilitated by ...

Dr Zongbo Shi has a research interest in Atmospheric Aerosol Chemistry and Global Biogeochemical Cycles. He is currently funded by the NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) fellowship scheme;he also holds a Birmingham University Fellowship.

Dr Graham Squires is a Senior Lecturer in Planning and Real Estate, in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research interests at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) include planning, real estate development, urban and environmental economics, housing, neighbourhoods, regeneration, and urban policy.

Dr Carl Stevenson is a structural geologist with a focus on the emplacement and subsurface distribution of igneous and volcanic rocks. His research uses rock magnetism, geophysics and petrology to determine the large-scale geometry and internal architecture of intrusions and has led to breakthroughs in understanding magma transport and accommodation in the Earth’s crust. This work has ...

Neil Suttie is a geophysicist whose research interests include palaeomagnetism and the Earth’s deep interior, archaeological dating, near surface geophysics, geophysical instrumentation, geomagnetism over historical and millennial timescales and magnetostratigraphy.

Dr Rick Thomas is a measurement scientist specializing in the use of novel instrumentation for climate and air quality research. At Scripps Institution of Oceanography, he recently developed a turbulent flux measurement package to resolve ambient 3D wind vectors from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and successfully used it alongside aerosol, cloud and water probes to investigate aerosol-cloud ...

Dr Emmanouil Tranos is an economic geographer focusing primarily on digital geographies. He has published on issues related with the spatiality of the Internet infrastructure, the economic impacts that this infrastructure can generate on space and the position of cities within spatial, complex networks. His research in this area led to a monograph on “The Geography of the Internet: ...

Chair in Environmental NanoscienceDirector of ResearchDirector of FENAC

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Professor Valsami-Jones’ research interests focus on understanding reactivity at the nanoscale, particularly interactions of nanoparticles with pollutants and biota and biomineralisation processes. She has carried out research on the interaction of a variety of carbon- and metal-based nano-objects with biota in vitro and in vivo and has pioneered novel methods of labelling ...

Anne Van Loon is a catchment hydrologist and hydrogeologist working on drought. She studies the relationship between climate, landscape/ geology, and hydrological extremes and its variation around the world. She is especially interested in the influence of storage in groundwater, human activities, and cold conditions (snow and glaciers) on the development of drought.

Dr Watt’s research investigates the physical and chemical processes that control the behavior and long-term development of volcanoes. Most of this work focuses on volcanism in subduction zones. Current projects include tephrochronological reconstructions of past explosive eruptions, studies of large-scale volcanic landslides and their associated hazards, and the chemistry and evolution of ...

James Wheeley is a teaching-focused lecturer in sedimentary geology and sedimentary basin analysis. His research interests lie in carbonate sedimentology and applied micropalaeontology (especially conodont isotopes) which he is using to address deep time (Palaeozoic) palaeoclimatic and palaeoecological problems. He is currently involved with the VISE (Vertebrate ISotopes and the ...

Dr Martin Widmann is a climate scientist. His current main research area is regional climate change, in particular the development and validation of statistical downscaling methods. He also studies past climates; the main activity in this field is the development of data assimilation methods to combine climate simulations with empirical knowledge from proxy data.

Cristiana is a cultural geographer currently working with Dr Sophie Hadfield-Hill on the New Urbanisms in India research project funded by the ESRC. The project investigates the everyday life of children, young people and families living in a new urban development in India.

Cristiana has conducted extensive qualitative research in India for her doctoral research, which ...